Local SEO Guide: Higher Google Rankings in 2018

Local SEO Guide: Higher Google Rankings in 2018

In fact, one of my readers recently used the checklist from this article & upped his organic traffic by 88.3%.

In this article, you’re gonna see the checklist that I use for all of my LocalSEO clients. You’ll also learn why you might want to delete,

yes delete, half the pages on your website. And a simple trick you can use to improve your Google rankings fast. Keep reading.

A few months ago, I sent out a newsletter to my email subscribers. This email listed out some of my all-time favorite traffic hacks.

Out of the blue, Sean Falconer, a successful business owner, replied to that email. He said, “Dude, I’ve tried all of these techniques before, “and they helped us get more traffic.”

When I looked at Sean’s site, I saw that he was doinga solid job with his content marketing and SEO.

But, I also noticed a few mistakes that were holding him back from Google’s first page. That’s when I sent him this message. A few hours later, Sean got back to me.

After executing the checklist that I’m about to show you, Sean’s organic traffic shot up by nearly 50% in 21 days. And once the checklist had time to kick in, Proven’s traffic increased by a whopping 88.3% three weeks after that.

Let’s dive in to the checklist that Sean used to get higher Google rankings.

Zombie pages provide no helpful content for Local SEO Services

Your first step is to find and eliminate what I call zombie pages.

I used to think that Google rewarded sites that publish lots and lots of unique content. But I was wrong. Today, I know the truth.

The truth is that Google doesn’t want you to publish content just for the sake of publishing content.

In fact, a Google employee recently stated that they prefer websites that publish fewer high quality pages.

This quality over quantity approach is one of the secrets behind my blog’s and local seo success.

Unlike most blogs, I only publish every four to six weeks. But when I do, I make sure each and every post is awesome, Really beefy and really helpful content but that much work is not needed for local SEO.

Fortunately, Sean only published high quality content on his blog. So, that wasn’t an issue. The problem was his site had lots of zombie pages.

So, what are zombie pages?

Zombie pages are pages on your site that don’t provide any value.

For example, zombie pages are pages like old and outdated blog posts and press releases, category and tag pages, search results pages, eCommerce product pages that don’t get any sales, thin content pages, and pages with duplicate content.

In theory, a local Business directory website shouldn’t have a ton of pages. After all, Proven is an online job board where job postings come and go.

They’ll crawl your site and let you know bout technical problems that might be hurting your site’s Local SEO.

Fortunately, Proven didn’t have too many technical SEO issues.

That’s mostly due to the fact that we deleted so many zombie pages. Fewer pages equals fewer problems.

The only problems I could find were some missing ALT text on images and a handful of duplicate titles. Not a big deal but worth fixing. As expected Sean quickly took care of all these technical SEO problems.

Now that we’ve fixed Proven.com’s technical problems, it was time to optimize their content.

Optimized Content for Local SEO

I probably don’t need to tell you that on-page SEO can make or break your site’s rankings. That’s why I dedicate an entire step of my SEO checklist to on-page SEO.

Because Proven had thousands of pages, I knew I couldn’t optimize every single one. So, Sean sent me his top 10 most important pages.

Now, some of Sean’s most important pages were blog posts and others were commercial pages that sold his services.

So, let’s look at a quick example of a page that I optimized for Sean. A blog post called Best Questions to Ask References, The Complete List. Sean’s target keyword for this post was questions to ask references.

I added that keyword to the top of the page. Why?

Because Google puts more weight on words that appear in the beginning of your content. It’s important that your keyword shows up there.

I also sprinkled in a few LSI keywords like business tips. LSI keywords are terms that are closely related to your target keyword.

When you include these LSI keywords in your content, you’llget a rankings boost.

In fact, my recent analysis of one million Google search results found that LSI keyword-rich content tended to outrank content that didn’t contain LSI keywords.

So, how can you use LSI keywords to get higher local seo rankings? Well, let’s say you just wrote an article about coffee.

LSI keywords for coffee would be things like mug, caffeine, and Starbucks. So, you want to make sure that you include those terms in your content.

Just enter your site into the tool and fix the problems that it tells you about.

Next, check out GTMetrix. Just like Google’s tool, GTMetrix will show you potential issues with your pages code.

But, it also let’s you know about server hosting problems that can slow down your site.

For example, in Sean’s case, his images weren’t compressed. So, they took forever to load. And this single fix made a huge impact on his loading speed.

Now that Sean’s site was optimized, error-free, and fast, i was time for the last step.

Content Skyscraper Technique

Which is to publish a piece of content using the skyscraper technique.

You probably already heard about the skyscraper technique. If you haven’t, here’s the deal.

The skyscraper technique is where you find the best content in your industry and then create something way better.

So, I sent an email to Sean and asked him,

“Have you noticed any content that’s ranking

“in Google, but isn’t even that good?”

He said, “Actually, everything I’ve seen written about job

descriptions is pretty weak.” Sean was right.

Most of the content out there about job descriptions were simple lists of links to different examples of job descriptions.

For whatever reason, they all used the same lame stock photos. So, I worked with Sean to create something way better than what was out there. How?

First, instead of a list to links to other pages, we listed each job description on a single page.

Next, Sean added helpful information about each job like the average salary and education requirements.

Finally, he used quality images instead of lame stock photos.

Sean’s post did great. It got a short-term surge in traffic after it went live.

Today, Sean’s skyscraper content currently ranks in the top five for his target keyword. And thanks to this content and the other techniques from this checklist, Sean’s organic traffic increased by 88.39%.

There you have it, my seven step checklist to improve your Google rankings in local SEO.